The sun still sets every day. The sun is still lower in the sky during the winter. You still need lots of land area to gather sun light. Forget it. There is not, nor will there ever be, an economically viable solar energy system as long as we can still find fossil fuels or we can use nuclear energy.

Rick Johnson

There is another technique that can be used to generate steam. It’s called combustion. Apparently, if you ‘combusts’ certain fossil fuels, they produce enough heat to generate enough steam to produce enough energy to power whole cities and major industries. It’s cheap and proven technology, with most of the necessary infrastructure is already in place. But the best bit is that you can still make electricity when the sun isn’t shinning. How cool is that. Electricity being generated at night. Who would have thought that would ever happen! 🙂

Ernst Bloefeld

Rick Johnson, this sounds like an outlandish idea. Has it ever been tried or is it strictly theoretical?

I’m sticking with wood, nothing ever got harmed by using wood.

Rick Johnson

Ernst

I believe it has been tried and the results have been promising.

I also recall hearing of a report that in some parts of the world it has been successfully operating on a fairly large scale, possibily even the main source of electricity in some parts.

I understand your attachment to wood, I may be wrong, but I believe that one day, fossil fuels could become the main source of energy for humanity. Sounds far fetched, I know, but it is possible.

Ernst Bloefeld

Rick Johnson, wow, we are living in the future. Are you speaking of coal, I guess you must be, because I don’t think there are any reliable sources of things like petroleum oil or gas are there? How would we get them and how would we move them? Its all very fascinating.

Dan

Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Duperray

Walter, are you familiar with Thermodynamics?
This beautiful MIT invention is nothing else than a scam from “scientists” looking for mediatic promotion. Even with a 3-times concentration factor, yielded steam temperature would even not reach 50% when they extract 85% of received solar heat.
What can we do with such low temp steam (almost equal to that one exiting from the lowest pressure steam turbine) ? Nothing. It’s even not worth for home heating purposes, let’s alone gathering cost, high volume (about 20 cubic meters for one single kilowatt-hour…).
When Universities also fall into such mediatic behaviour, I consider that their scientific worth dwindles down to nothing.
FYI, existing higher concentration systems can yield acceptable higher temperatures for energy conversion and storage…

Ernst Bloefeld

Duperray, that damn Second LAW of Thermodynamics. It makes a lot of this stuff a bitch to make work.